A model of the DNA helix sits on the desk by professor Sara Snogerup Linse, member of the Nobel Assembly, during a press conference at the Royal Swedish Academy in Stockholm, Wednesday, Oct. 7, 2015. Sweden’s Tomas Lindahl, American Paul Modrich and U.S.-Turkish scientist Aziz Sancar won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for “mechanistic studies of DNA repair.” (Fredrik Sandberg/TT News Agency via AP)

STOCKHOLM — Three scientists from Sweden, the U.S. and Turkey won the Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday for showing how cells repair damaged DNA, work that’s inspired the development of new cancer treatments.

Swedish scientist Tomas Lindahl, American Paul Modrich and U.S.-Turkish national Aziz Sancar shared the 8 million Swedish kronor (about $960,000) award for research done in the 1970s and ‘80s.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said their work on DNA repair had provided “fundamental knowledge” about how cells function and shed light on the mechanisms behind both cancer and aging.

Lindahl, 77, is an emeritus group leader at Francis Crick Institute and Emeritus director of Cancer Research UK at Clare Hall Laboratory in Britain.

Modrich, born in 1946, is an investigator at Howard Hughes Medical Institute and professor at Duke University School of Medicine in Durham, North Carolina.

Sancar, 69, is a professor at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He is the second Turk to win a Nobel Prize after novelist Orhan Pamuk was awarded the literature prize in 2006.

“I’m sure there will be (celebrations in Turkey),” Sancar said in an interview published on the Nobel Foundation’s website. “Yes, they’ve been asking over the years and I was tired of hearing ‘when are you going to get the Nobel Prize?’ so I’m glad for my country as well.”

Speaking by phone to a news conference in Stockholm, Lindahl said “it was a surprise” to win the award.

Paul Modrich’s wife, Vickers Burdett, told The Associated Press by phone that they were on vacation in New Hampshire.

“Wow! I can’t express it any better than that. Awesome!” she said in reaction to the announcement, which she called “a total shock.”

The laureates broke new ground by mapping and explaining how a cell safeguards its DNA — the molecule that contains our genes. Our DNA is constantly under assault from ultraviolet rays from the sun and carcinogenic substances.

But it was thought to be a stable molecule until the 1970s when Lindahl showed that it decays at a rate that seemed incompatible with human life.

He realized that there must a repair mechanism, opening a new field of research, the academy said.

Working at Yale University, Sancar mapped the mechanism that cells use to repair UV-damaged DNA. Modrich showed how the cell corrects errors when DNA is replicated during cell division, a process known as mismatch repair.

The findings are significant for cancer research, because cancer cells are kept alive by DNA repair mechanisms. Researchers are now looking at ways to destroy the repair mechanisms within the cancer cells to kill them, academy member Peter Brzezinski said.

The academy highlighted one such drug that’s already on the market: olaparib, which is used to fight ovarian cancer.

The award will be handed out along with the other Nobel Prizes on Dec. 10, the anniversary of prize founder Alfred Nobel’s death in 1896.

This year’s medicine prize went to scientists from Japan, the U.S. and China who discovered drugs to fight malaria and other tropical diseases. Japanese and Canadian scientists won the physics prize for discovering that tiny particles called neutrinos have mass.

The Nobel announcements continue with literature on Thursday, the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday and the economics award on Monday.

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AP Science Writer Malcolm Ritter in New York and AP journalists David Keyton in Stockholm and Jack Jones in Columbia, South Carolina, contributed to this report.

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